Promotion Concepts

I’ve never had to do anything like this before. A few weeks ago, my boss turned to me and said, «We should get some plaques to celebrate 2011.» And being the control freak that I am, I decided to figure this out myself rather than let our Marketing team do it.
I spoke with Al who had me come in to look at some options.
I was a demanding customer for a few reasons:
(1) I had no idea what I was doing, so Al had to walk me through the whole process and watch as I went back and forth and back and forth on designs.
(2) Although I hadn’t received the product yet, I needed to make sure the payment hit my 2011 budget. I realized on the morning of the 28^th that it was the last day for me to submit the expense report. In a rush, they created an invoice for me to pay.
(3) I needed the product by a certain date to present at a meeting, so I nagged them a lot to make sure I got it in time. This was clearly unnecessary. They even dropped it off at my office.
The product came out beautifully. And I really loved that Al didn’t take advantage of my lack of experience with this kind of thing. He didn’t jump to the most expensive options even though I told him, honestly, that I had no idea what would be reasonable. (He could’ve told me it’d cost $ 500 for a plaque, and I wouldn’t have known any better.) Instead, he started with one of their lower priced catalogs, so I could see all of the options. Al was easy to work with: understanding, fun to talk to, accommodating.
They didn’t just put up with my nonsense – they treated me like I was a great customer of theirs even though it was my first time working with them.
Love it.